Black Widow Likely To Return for Captain America: The Winter Soldier

This is the face Natasha Romanoff makes when you don’t give you her own movie. It’s also the face she makes when she found out that she was going to be in The Avengers. It’s also the face she makes when you throw her a surprise birthday party.

Look, it’s just hard to get the drop on her, is what I’m saying. But if there’s any Marvel movie being made right now that the Widow belongs in, it’s Captain America: The Winder Soldier, and according to Deadline, that’s probably what’s going to happen.

Winter Soldier is a clear reference to the fate of Bucky Barnes, introduced as Steve Rogers’ best friend and killed during the events of Captain America: The First Avenger. In comics, Bucky’s death was eventually revealed to have been merely a disappearance. He was recovered by Russian soldiers and scientists, having lost all memory of his identity, crafted into a supersoldier in ways similar to both Black Widow and Captain America’s backstories, and given the codename Winter Soldier. When not on missions, he was kept in cryogenic stasis and so has aged as little as Steve Rogers himself by the time S.H.I.E.L.D figures out his real identity. Steve confronts him and winds up using the Cosmic Cube (translation: the Tesseract) to restore his memories and yaay Bucky’s back except he’s now got to deal emotionally with all the terrible stuff he did while he was an assassin.

Kind of like another Russian spy lady we know, who, incidentally, kind of dated Bucky for a while when she was still working for the Reds and he was still Winter Soldier. So not featuring Natasha in a Winter Soldier movie would have been, well, silly. And certainly very disappointing for all the Bucky/Nat shippers out there.

Fortunately, while the studio is still apparently searching for that perfect leading lady (who many believe to be Sharon Carter, the niece of Peggy, Steve Roger’s love interest from the first Captain America movie) Deadline is “hearing that Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow will be in the mix on this film.” Thank goodness. It would be an enormous pity if she were to disappear until The Avengers 2. One wonders if Hulk and Hawkeye will be getting their own pushes into the next round of Marvel films.

And in case you were wondering, the actresses in the running for Could-Be-Sharon-Carter-Maybe are Daenerys Targaryen herself, Emilia Clarke, Lady Sybil Crawley (Jessica Brown Findlay), Annie Edison (Alison Brie), Teresa Palmer (who doesn’t really have a particularly nerd-relevant role although she did once play a character named Becky Barnes, so that’s funny), and Imogen Poots of 28 Days Later and about five compelling seconds of V for Vendetta.

(via ScreenRant.)